When Paul Warshauer set about creating the first Mee-Ow Show in 1974, he had no way of knowing that the student-produced variety show would continue for close to three decades and count dozens of famous alumni among its cast and crew.
Today, Warshauer sells mostly theater-related real estate and is heading the restoration efforts on the historic Uptown Theater in downtown Chicago, back in his Northwestern days, he was a theater man.
“I was an aggressive little freshman,” Warshauer said. In his first year at NU he formed the Freshmen Theater Workshop, acted as a treasurer of the Foster-Walker Housing Complex and produced and directed shows around campus.
Because he had developed a reputation among some theater students for being a go-getter, in the fall of Warshauer’s sophomore year, he was approached by senior theater major, Josh Lazar, about developing a new sort of student-produced variety show.
“One day Josh stopped me in the hall and said, ‘I was told you are the only one with the intelligence to produce a show like that,'” Warshauer said. Lazar and other theater students were tired of how the long-standing Waa-Mu show mistreated student writers and actors, Warshauer said.
From that initial conversation Lazar and Warshauer went to work, with Warshauer taking on producing tasks and Lazar writing scripts and “annoying the Waa-Mu people.” The name for the show, Warshauer said, was his idea. “I said, ‘Well, we’re the Wildcats so why don’t we just call it Meow?'” With a little alteration to have five letters like Waa-Mu, the name became Mee-Ow.
But there were much bigger problems to face than just picking a name, like recruiting writers and actors, finding money to put on the production and looking for a place to perform.
Suzanne Sciez Katz (Speech ’77), a member of the first Mee-Ow Show cast and now a singer with the Chicago Symphony Chorus, said Mee-Ow worked because of the students who participated.
“Mee-Ow was truly a student-conceived, student-written, student-centered production. I loved working with people outside my own department and discipline,” Katz said. “It was good to be involved in the world beyond the narrow scope of
